Effective sales management is based on a variety of different strategies, like being able to motivate your teams, setting goals and quotas, motivating reps, and reviewing data and performance.
While all of these strategies can lead you to be successful, there are also frameworks to follow, like agile sales management, that will supplement your process.
In this post, learn about agile sales, how to grow a successful agile sales team, and key processes to follow.
Why should you care about agile sales?
There are three changes in the sales world that should make you sit up and pay attention.
First, millennials are making up larger and larger parts of your sales team. Right now, theyโre probably SDRs and AEs โ with a few ambitious ones holding management or even director roles. But in eight years, millennials may hold half of your leadership positions. In 15? Theyโll probably hold all of them.
That means you canโt keep using the same techniques and tactics. These professionals have grown up with constant access to information. As a result, theyโre independent, learn quickly, enjoy collaboration, are incredibly tech-savvy, and get bored doing the same things over and over. Agile sales help you adapt your sales org to suit these traits.
Second, your customers are different. Few people have the patience or desire to be forced through a rigid sales process. Now they can self-educate โ and theyโll quickly lose interest if your reps make them answer a laundry list of questions about things they couldโve learned online or donโt add any value to the research process.
If you want your salespeople to deliver unique, consultative, high-value experiences to each and every buyer they interact with, the agile sales methodology makes it much easier for reps to respond in real-time and meet client needs.
Finally, we have an unprecedented amount of data. You can learn everything from your lowest-performing repโs average call-to-demo conversion rate to the average number of deals closed on the last day of the month in a few clicks. The dark side to all this data? If youโre not focused and intentional, youโll get lost in it. Agile sales involve constantly reviewing and reacting to data โ making it an ideal solution.
Agile Sales Explained
We gave a brief summary above, but letโs dive further into how agile sales works.
When using this framework, work is organized into โsprints.โ A sprint typically lasts one to two weeks and has a specific objective.
Every sprint starts with a two-to-four-hour planning meeting to decide on the sprint goal (which must be summed up in one sentence) and break down that objective into discrete tasks or milestones. The latter should result in a list of projects, known as the Sprint Backlog.
Each morning, the team gets together for a stand-up. This meeting is meant to be quick โ in fact, most companies make everyone stand up for the duration, hence the name. Team members go around and explain:
- What they accomplished yesterday
- What theyโll accomplish today
- Any obstacles theyโre facing
This helps everyone stay on the same page and provides accountability.
How To Implement Agile Sales
Implementing an agile sales methodology is centered around seven essential processes: sprints, daily standups, short-term goals, a flexible strategy, leveraging a CRM, data, and review. Letโs discuss each below.
Agile Sales Tactics
1. Sprints
Divide work into sprints of just one to two weeks at most. With these sprints, you can have kickoff meetings where you inform salespeople of the goal of the sprint and what tasks will need to happen to achieve that goal.
2. Daily Standups
Standups are helpful for any group that works collaboratively:
- ABM teams
- Tiger teams targeting a list of prospects
- BDR-AE teams
The idea is simple. Have a quick (5-15 minutes) status update meeting at the beginning of the workday. Each person should share what they did the day before, explain what theyโll work on that day, and ask for help or guidance if necessary.
Standups definitely boost alignment and accountability (plus, they make your team feel like more of a team.)
3. Short-term Goals
Sales objectives can often feel overwhelming and impossible to achieve. For example, maybe you want to go to Presidentโs Club this year, but that would mean performing 30% better than last year โ which you donโt think you can pull off no matter how hard you work.
Or youโre a sales manager, and you want to double your teamโs average contract value โ but that seems like a monumental feat.
To make these goals feel in your reach, borrow the โsprintโ concept from agile. Rather than looking at the end goal, break it down into sub-goals. These objectives should be short-term (think monthly, weekly, or even daily).
For example, letโs say to make P Club you need to hit 120% of your annual quota. That translates to $84,000.
In other words, you need to sell $7,000 every month. But you know that some months are better โ The first quarter tends to be huge, while June, July, and August are slow. With that in mind, you create this schedule:
January: $8,000
February: $7,500
March: $8,500
April: $6,000
May: $6,000
June: $5,000
July: $5,000
August: $5,000
September: $9,000
October: $7,500
November: $8,000
December: $9,000
(If you do the math, this comes out to $84,500. Itโs always good to have a cushion!)
Now that youโve broken down your major goal into monthly ones, qualifying for P Club seems a lot more feasible.
Sales managers, use this framework to guide your repsโ goal-setting process. First, figure out their โpie in the skyโ goal. What do they want to accomplish this year? Then, work with them to create a timeline with milestones.
4. A Flexible Strategy
Flexibility and iteration are the foundation of agile sales. That means reacting in real-time to new data and information and adapting as needed.
Letโs look at two examples of how you might iterate or pivot. First, imagine youโre the director of your companyโs SMB segment. In the past few weeks, your reps have lost ten deals to a new, lower-cost competitor.
- Option 1: Let this play out. You know the competitorโs product is inferior, so in time, customers will figure out the cheaper price isnโt worth it and switch to you.
- Option 2: Create a battlecard that helps salespeople position your product as the higher-quality, more reliable choice, goes over common customer objections and responses, and outlines testimonials from customers who have chosen you over the competitor.
The first option โ essentially, stay the course โ isnโt agile. The second option is quintessential agile: Being quick to respond and adapt to changing customer needs.
You can also use this mentality to react to:
- Market/industry changes
- New legislation
- Product updates and launches
- Company-wide strategic shifts
- Changes in leadership
And more. Basically, you should constantly be analyzing whatโs happening in your world and figuring out how to change your process, objectives, or strategy to keep up.
5. Leveraging a CRM
Without a system of truth, itโs extremely difficult to hold salespeople accountable. (The same goes if youโre a rep: How can you analyze your progress if youโre not tracking it?)
That makes your CRM an essential component of agile sales. At many companies, the rule is โIf itโs not in the CRM, it didnโt happen.โ
There are a few ways to enforce this:
- Donโt count emails, calls, or demos toward activity goals if theyโre not logged in the CRM
- Donโt discuss deals during pipeline review if thereโs not a matching opportunity in the repโs CRM pipeline
- Donโt comp reps on deals that arenโt in the CRM
Of course, getting your salespeople to record everything will be far easier if your sales and marketing tools are synced with your CRM. For example, teams using HubSpot Sales Hub will automatically have their calls, emails, and meetings recorded in the CRM โ no manual data entry required.
6. Data
Agile salesโ emphasis on data dovetails perfectly with modern sales management. Whether youโre a rep, a manager, or an executive, data tells you if your strategy is working โ and how well.
Different metrics matter for different situations and objectives. Perhaps you review your last quarter and realize thereโs huge fallout between your qualification and discovery calls. After listening to a few call recordings with your manager, you identify two issues:
- You talk too much
- You donโt ask enough open-ended questions
Your key metrics for the next month should be:
- Talk-to-listen ratio (aiming for 30:70)
- # of open-ended questions per call (shooting for 6+)
- Qualification-to-discovery conversion rate (target is 30%)
Notice that youโre focusing on these metrics within a short timeframe (essentially, a sprint). You can easily manage these specific metrics and evaluate your progress at the end of the month.
A sales manager, on the other hand, might be focusing on these metrics:
- Average deal velocity, or typical length of sales cycle
- Average deal size
- Average quota attainment
If you have a specific goal for the month โ like getting your salespeople to follow up more quickly โ youโd also be focused on average lead response time.
The bottom line is: Come up with your short-term goals first, then work backward to determine the best metrics for gauging progress.
7. Review
After each sprint is completed, have a review meeting to go over the outcomes of the sprint, goals met, and what was not able to be achieved.
As a sales manager, you can lead the majority of the meeting, but you can also consider having teams or specific individuals present on progress. This can help reps take accountability for their process and bolster feelings of collaboration and teamwork.
Steps To Build an Agile Sales Team
Building a successful agile sales team is dependent on four critical factors: accountability, adaptability, and collaboration, transparency.
Accountability
Agile sales teams need to practice accountability. As there are specific milestones to meet during specific sprints, all involved parties need to own their actions to help the team meet their goals. Salespeople should take ownership of their practices, both positive outcomes and those that need improvement, and be forthright about them and be able to ask for help when necessary.
Adaptability
Agile practices can always change, so teams need to be adaptable and handle changes when they arise. Thus, while you should have a baseline framework that you follow, the framework should have room for flexibility, like working with customers that are more informed than others or pivoting a strategy as a result of data.
Collaboration
As successful agile sales processes require teams to be able to work together, collaboration is key. Individuals should know who is on their team, what their job duties are, and how their job duties contribute to other teamsโ successes. They should be able to approach other team members to ask questions. Departments should also be aligned to achieve the same goals.
Stand-ups are incredibly valuable for establishing collaboration amongst your teams.
Transparency
Transparency is similar to accountability, as reps and all team members understand progress towards meeting goals throughout the entire sprint. As a result, they arenโt surprised by quotas not met at the end of your sprints because the information is available to them throughout the entire process. Essentially, transparency is directly related to teams having context for what is happening in the sales process at all times.
Over To You
Agile sales is a natural evolution for sales teams. It helps you leverage your data, team members, and motivation to get the best results possible.